The Ministry of Education is endeavouring to build an education system that is responsive to the challenges of the 21st century. This includes revising the school curriculum and a major investment in programmes of research and development. This paper examines the discourses relating to diversity and education that have become ...

Since the introduction of senior social studies for the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA ) in 2002, some progress has been made towards developing a unique identity for the subject. This progress has clarified a number of unresolved tensions relating to the nature and purpose of social studies, which ...

The purpose of this paper is to understand how teachers’ identities as assessors in a standards-referenced assessment system may be developed through their participation in online social moderation meetings. In these meetings, teachers negotiate and share their understandings of assessment standards and judgement decisions. In particular, the paper focuses on ...

Māori language education settings have resulted in teachers requiring efficient ways to identify the oral Māori language proficiency of students at the beginning of Māori-immersion schooling and throughout their participation as the basis for students’ ongoing learning. Accordingly, three assessment tools were developed using understandings from sociocultural perspectives on human ...

The conceptions teachers have about assessment are assumed to influence their practices and to be consistent with the jurisdictional and policy frameworks in which they work. This paper compares two groups of teachers (i.e., New Zealand primary and secondary) in response to the Teachers’ Conceptions of Assessment (TCoA–IIIA) self-administered survey ...

Using an interpretive, qualitative case study methodology, the current study investigated 20 primary school teachers’ beliefs and understandings about feedback, and the use of feedback to enhance student learning. The use of Sadler’s (1989) theoretical framework illuminated both similarities and differences among teachers. As teachers’ feedback discourse was examined in ...

The introduction of a revised national curriculum for New Zealand has precipitated a subject-wide project to align requirements for high-stakes secondary school assessments (the National Certificate of Educational Achievement [NCEA] achievement standards) with curriculum aims and intentions. This article considers the process of revising NCEA standards and the potential for ...

Since 1995, New Zealand’s National Education Monitoring Project (NEMP) has been responsible for the national assessment of students’ achievement in each of the learning areas in the curriculum. One of the assessment approaches used by NEMP is the one-to-one student interview. This paper addresses variation within individual teacher administrators’ practice ...

The implementation of best practice models for assessment begins with teachers who are working in their own classes to integrate strategies into their teaching context. The effect of best practice strategies is greatly increased when there is a meeting of minds between teachers, students, school managers, academics, policy makers and ...

This study explored elementary and secondary school administrators’ perspectives on their attempts to build assessment literacy—an understanding of the principles and practices of sound assessment. Using a semistructured interview format, administrators were asked to share successes and challenges with various types of assessment. Transcripts revealed an imbalance between formative and ...